Wednesday, September 8, 2010

A Good Day... Except for the Lawnmowing...

Now that I've gone back to facebook, and finished there, I am back, for real this time. I really need to discourage Babycat from sitting on the keyboard, but at the moment it seems more important to stop her annoying her mother.

Speaking of:

I don't know that there's still any milk in there, though I'm assuming there is since she stayed on the boob a while, which was annoying, and not only because I was getting shit done. Janelle from work was telling me about a cat that's 18 months old now and still on the boob so I am a bit worried, but Babycat is not even 11 weeks yet, and she drinks from a bowl and eats real food, so I'm sure she'll get over it/cope fine if the well runs dry.

As you can kinda see, I made progress on the mini quilt. Actually, around mowing the lawn, washing my hair and the cats sitting on it as I tried to put it through the machine, I actually finished it.

Despite the shoddyness of the second photo, there is some consensus in my house (well, Casey and Becky) that the back is nicer than the front. I will agree to a certain extent that the back is less for the brain to try and appreciate, and that the first retro quilt taught me the value of a simplified design with a solid colour to tie it all together, but I'm not keen on the layout of the back. They were the 8 blocks I had left, I shuffled them about for at least half of The View (it was the one with Obama on, that they have aired at least 4 times now) but I never came to a balance I was satisfied with, with regards to the spacing between the designs and the positioning of the browns, which appear quite high contrast on the back.

Final size is 80cm by 106cm, which is too small really for me to use, and the cotton batting seems much stiffer than the bamboo I have gotten used to. But it hasn't been washed yet, and that might make a difference.

I did my machine's wavy line quilting which I'm so fond of, and it ended up being even tighter than the BlueGreen quilt, about three rows to two, at 7 rows per block and one on the seam. But on flat batting I feel the more quilting the better, since the batting doesn't push out on the piecing and hold the seams flat, and I worry that it will all fall apart if the seams havent been sewn over or at least near to.

I would have done an over the seams quilt were it not for the fact that I couldn't match up the panels at the back, and I thought it would look a bit daft on that side if the quilting was a centimetre or so off the seam on half the blocks, and following some random line on the others. I tried my best to get the vertical seams at least to match up, devoting an entire episode of The Mentalist to it, but they're still a little bit off. There's so many lines though and it's the best thing about the wavy stitch, that it doesn't really matter like a straight int the ditch does.

Anyway, next up should be either finishing the boat quilt cover or the purple quilt, which is under a pile of stuff at the moment, and also Mama Jan's quilt which is due in 3 weeks, as well as a bag for one of the girls at work, which I am going to have to remember how to do. I've bought some foam a bit thinner that what I used for mine, so it shouldn't be as hard, but I suspect it will still take me a bit to get back in the swing of it.

Or I could have a go at another mini quilt, I'm liking them; they're quicker and easier than big ones, and you can try out more exciting stuff for them. But I haven't got a cohesive bundle of fabrics I'm willing to use right now, so it might have to wait.

Also coming us is Christmas quilting night at Spotlight on Thursday, which I may or may not do something for - on the one hand, I do like to get involved, on the other, I really dislike the idea of making a quilt to use for less than a month per year. But I bought some nice Christmas paisleys last year, that were just not-Christmassy enough to catch my fancy, so I might whip up a little something with them tomorrow after work, if I can remember where I put them.